Donald's English Classroom

“The headline screamed at him as soon as he saw the paper. He almost screamed back.”
― Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

The familiar large-type, front-page headline didn’t come into use until the later 19th century as increased competition among newspapers led to the need for attention-grabbing headlines. This practice has successfully carried over from print news to online news with “screaming” headlines urging you to click through and read more.

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Some of the most famous, creative, and notorious headlines take us back in history, provide a window into the state of the culture, and can even shape our collective response. Though the idea of a creative guy with his feet on a desk being paid to brainstorm snappy headlines works well in the movies, the reality of the business is staider with a hierarchy of accountability.

The headline is often the duty of copy editors. Writers may suggest a headline, but beyond word count, they may know little about the space in the paper and how the story will appear. A section editor or editor-in-chief may overrule the copy editor before the layout becomes final. Collectively, their efforts don’t go unrecognized – or ridiculed if bold errors are made. In the United States, headline contests are sponsored by the American Copy Editors Society and the National Federation of Press Women.

Because a physical newspaper’s above-the-fold, front-page real estate is the most valuable, newspapers developed a set of grammatical rules for an abbreviated or compressed telegraphic style known as headlinese. The syntactic conventions include:

• “Be” verbs and articles (a, an, the) are usually omitted.
• Most verbs are in the simple present tense.
• The conjunction and is often replaced by a comma.
• Surnames are used with no honorifics.
• Organizations and institutions are indicated by metonymy: Wall Street, White House, California, etc.
• Abbreviations, contractions, and acronyms are used wherever possible.
• No periods are used even if the headline forms a complete sentence.

Word choice and word alternatives are also of paramount importance for saving space. This forces editors to be painfully blunt or wildly idiosyncratic in their creative effort to relay as much information in the shortest space possible.

Alternative word choices include:

• axe (eliminate)
• bid (attempt)
• blast (heavily criticize)
• hike (increase)
• ink (sign a contract)
• mull (contemplate)
• nab (grab)
• nix (reject)
• pen (write)
• slam (heavily criticize)
• tout (promote)

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With this abbreviated writing style, the media has been criticized for their overuse of words such as slam, blast, rip, and bash, drawing comparisons to professional wrestling matches rather than sober journalism. This over-reliance on the promise of a titillating or conflict-laden narrative gave rise to the 21st-century internet term clickbait.

FYI: The term clickbait was invented by Jay Geiger in a blog post written in December of 2006.

Headlinese can also go awry. When a headline delivers a message that is unintended or is so ambiguous as to have multiple interpretations, it’s known as Crash Blossoms. The term comes from a 2009 Japan Times news article with the headline, “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms.” The article was later re-titled, “Violinist shirks off her tragic image.”

Another example of Crash Blossoms is The Times 2019 headline “Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five.” Normally, readers have come to expect the word named to mean “blamed” or “held accountable.” In this case, the headline can be humorously interpreted to mean “Hospitals named after sandwiches, kill five.”

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a few knee-slapping headlines from companies that scrape the bottom of the yellow journalists’ barrel. When doing research for this post, the internet offered no end of historical tabloid headlines so outrageous, you’d have to be an idiot or member of some online cult to actually believe them. Unfortunately, there are numerous faux “news” companies more than willing to take advantage of gullible people.

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You might also be interested in learning why acronyms are so popular, what the X in LAX actually means, or the reason Pikes Peak is spelled without an apostrophe by law!

See the previous or next Fun Facts About English.

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